Fostering Accelerated Scientific Transformations, Education, and Research (FASTER) is a NSF-MRI-funded cluster (award number 2019129) that offers state of the art CPUs, GPUs, and NVMe (Non-Volatile MemoryExpress) based storage in a composable environment. The supercomputer uses an innovative composable software-hardware approach to let a researcher attach GPUs to CPUs depending on their workflow. Unlike traditional cluster architectures, each rack on FASTER hosts a stack of GPUs that are shared with the CPU-hosting nodes. Using a standard Slurm script, a researcher can choose to add 10 GPUs to their CPU-node request. The machine will specifically help researchers using workflows that can benefit from simultaneous access to several GPUs, surpassing accelerator limits imposed on conventional supercomputers.
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TAMU FASTER
FASTER (Fostering Accelerated Scientific Transformations, Education and Research) is funded by the NSF MRI program (Award #2019129) and provides a composable high-performance data-analysis and computing instrument. The FASTER system has 180 compute nodes with 2 Intel 32-core Ice Lake processors and 256 GB RAM, and includes 240 NVIDIA GPUs (40 A100 and 200 T4 GPUs). Using LIQID’s composable technology, all 180 compute nodes have access to the pool of available GPUs, dramatically improving workflow scalability. FASTER will have HDR InfiniBand interconnection and access/share a 5PB usable high-performance storage system running Lustre filesystem. Thirty percent of FASTER’s computing resources are allocated to researchers nationwide through ACCESS.
